Sighting in Marseille, August 7, 2018

In the night of 6 to 7 August 2018, at about 1:12 a.m., a witness standing on their terrace was surprised by a steady light directly in front of them. They looked at it through binoculars and were stunned to see a luminous circle of several colors, with two very bright lights at its center, one red and one yellow. The witness contacted the gendarmerie, then went to bed around 1:30 a.m., troubled by what they had seen. When they got up at 5:05 a.m., the phenomenon was gone. No other testimony was collected.

The witness's precise drawings made it possible to reconstruct their line of sight: due south. Mars, very bright (magnitude -3.6), was exactly there above the mountains, as in the drawings. It stood 20° high and was clearly above the summits, which did not exceed 5° as seen from the witness's position. The witness overestimated the height of the phenomenon, putting it at 45°, which is typical. Saturn, fainter (magnitude 0) but still brighter than the other stars in that area, was 30° further right, to the west. These two planets match the two very bright lights, red (Mars) and yellow (Saturn), surrounded by white stars. Using binoculars, which are hard to focus on a celestial body and produce artifacts, may have made the mistake worse. The sky was clear and the witness located things accurately: had they been looking at something other than Mars, they would very probably have mentioned Mars too. GEIPAN therefore classified the case as A: an observation of Mars.